The Eyes Have It

By James Poniewozik

One of my heroes has always been Dr. Frankenstein," says an interviewee in Errol Morris' First Person (Bravo, Wednesdays, 10:30 p.m. E.T.)--Saul Kent, a mild-mannered cryonics buff who lovingly had his dead mother's severed head frozen. "I just think he's been misunderstood." In a way, Kent has captured the theme of his interlocutor's career. In Morris' acclaimed film documentaries, he has sought to understand the unfathomable--from a Holocaust denier who builds electric chairs to the work of physicist Stephen Hawking--a task he continues in this remarkable series of profiles in peculiarity.

And much like Mary Shelley's doctor, Morris is an inventor. His creation: the Interrotron, a camera with a TelePrompTer rigged over the lens to display Morris' image, so subjects can look right into the lens while talking to him. Letting them address viewers directly--hence the series title--the device changes the very structure of the narrative. "There's something powerful about eye contact," says Morris. "When someone looks into your eyes, are you aware of it? You betcha."

Especially if the subject is talking about dating a serial killer or building a friendlier abattoir. Morris is drawn to the Frankensteinian: inventors, self-styled scientists and folks on weird quests of self-discovery. They can be creepy, like Kent, but their stories are moving too. Take Temple Grandin, an autistic woman who empathizes with animals because she thinks in images, which, she contends, is how they think as well. She invented the "stairway to heaven," a slaughterhouse design that uses optical illusions to lead cattle calmly to their death, yet has a bond with the beasts born of her experience--terrifying autistic episodes of overstimulation. In theory, the story is ghastly. In practice, it's flat-out beautiful.

And beautiful looking. Morris' work is not only fun--in an interview he talks gleefully about a coming episode, "Clyde Roper, Squid Hunter!"--but also artful, interspersed with haunting staged scenes like that of the cattle posed regally on a set in Grandin's episode. "It's the reverse of Unsolved Mysteries, where the narrator says, 'She walked through the door,' and a woman walks through a door. I try to capture an idea in images. It's dreamscape."

Given the low aesthetic ambitions of most reality TV, it's not surprising that Fox and ABC passed on his earlier docu-series pitches. Morris plans to continue First Person (he's finished 11 episodes), saying it's a relief from the long process of making feature documentaries: "I've always had more ideas than time." With his new outlet, he sounds as excited as a guy who's just landed a really, really big squid.

--By James Poniewozik